Popular music itself was about to be revolutionised by an obscure form of music, born in the saloons of the Southwest, too complex to dance to and too jagged to sing, whose irrepressible energy and syncopated rhythms fascinated the American public: ragtime, rst published in 1897 (the rst syncopated song, The Bonja Song, was indeed published in 1818 and was inspired by African Diasporic music heard in Jamaica; it also contains the rst mention of the banjo, the sole instrument of certain African origin entered in American music) and massively recorded from 1910, when Tin Pan Alley composers re ected the change, most famously Irving Berlin with “Alexander's Ragtime Band” (1911). Berlin, born Isadore Balin in a Russian Jewish family, popularized di erent “ethnic” genres including the “wop songs”, equivalent for Italians of the “coon songs” for AfricanAmericans.
Popular music in the USA Popular music, as we know it today, is a genre of music that has dominated the world as part of the global hegemony of American culture and production modes. Its penetrating presence accompanied the success of lms, television programs, comics and industrial brands for food, clothing and transportation, all the accoutrements of an urban industrial culture. Local genres of popular music had to deal with this domination or succumb; many managed to hybridise, using it for their own purposes. It is increasingly against this concept of “popular music” that “classical music” de ned itself and held its place on the market. The process began before the end of the XIX Century: the most famous Neapolitan song, O' sole mio, often held up as an example of traditional “local” music, is based on the havanera rhythm made popular by the bridge of St. Louis Blues in the USA, but already popular in Parisian café chantants where Bizet lifted it for Carmen. That is why, despite the plurality of local genres, it is American popular music that we have to discuss in greater detail.
Popular music in the USA as we know it now has been created in a process of Africanisation. From 1850 for more than 150 years several waves of musical styles derived from the African Diaspora, often related to dance fashions, changed the presentation and content of popular music in the United States, with increasing contributions from all over the black Diaspora: minstrel shows with their accompanying “coon” songs and juba dancing (1850), ragtime (1890), New Orleans jazz, charleston and
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Creative Connections - EJN 2021
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introduction of commercial pre-recorded at records by Berliner, the medium that became prevalent after 1910, supplanting Edison's cylinders (Edison’s machine, it is worth remembering, allowed recording as well as listening, and was therefore not restricted to passive listening, as was the case with the vast majority of at discs, and also with cassette tape).
